And from that intense fear, trammeling the
freedom of his steps at every turn, and overruling every motion to the
right or to the left, in pure servile anxiety for the mood and
disposition of his tyrannical master, arose the very opposite result
for us of this day--that we, by the very means adopted to prevent
weariness in the immediate auditors, find nothing surviving in Grecian
orations but what _does_ weary us insupportably through its want of
all general interest; and, even amongst private or instant details of
politics or law, presenting us with none that throw light upon the
spirit of manners, or the Grecian peculiarities of feeling. Probably
an Athenian mob would not have cared much at the prospect of such a
result to posterity; and, at any rate, would not have sacrificed one
atom of their ease or pleasure to obviate such a result: but, to an
Athenian orator, this result would have been a sad one to contemplate.
The final consequence is, that whilst all men find, or may find,
infinite amusement, and instruction of the most liberal kind, in that
most accomplished of statesmen and orators, the Roman Cicero--nay,
would doubtless, from the causes assigned, have found, in their
proportion, the same attractions in the speeches of the elder Antony,
of Hortensius, of Crassus, and other contemporaries or immediate
predecessors of Cicero--no person ever reads Demosthenes, still less
any other Athenian orator, with the slightest interest beyond that
which inevitably attaches to the words of one who wrote his own divine
language with probably very superior skill.

But, from all this, results a further inference--viz. the dire
affectation of those who pretend an enthusiasm in the oratory of
Demosthenes; and also a plenary consolation to all who are obliged,
from ignorance of Greek, to dispense with that novelty. If it be a
luxury at all, it is and can be one for those only who cultivate
verbal researches and the pleasures of philology.

Even in the oratory of our own times, which oftentimes discusses
questions to the whole growth and motion of which we have been
ourselves parties present, or even accessary--questions which we have
followed in their first emersion and separation from the clouds of
general politics; their advance, slow or rapid, towards a domineering
interest in the public passions; their meridian altitude; and perhaps
their precipitous descent downwards, whether from the consummation of
their objects (as in